BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
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{ This page and the next page consist of material provided by Professor Setear.
The excerpt from The Guns of August begins on page 3. }
From an international political viewpoint, the summer of 1914 saw Europe
plunged into crisis and then war. What was called “The Great War” at the time
would, with the unfortunate hindsight provided by the conflict that began just 25
years later, become known as “World War I.” From an international legal
viewpoint, the summer crisis and the outbreak of war involved not only the
system of alliances described at the end of the previous chapter but also Belgian
neutrality and the role of declarations of war.
The excerpt below consists of Chapters Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine from
The Guns of August. Together, these chapters comprise a section of the book
entitled “Outbreak.” The preceding section of the book, “Plans,” focused on the
plans of the armies of Germany, France, and Great Britain. Germany’s
“Schlieffen Plan” envisioned a sweeping movement through neutral Belgium in
order to outflank French forces and seize Paris. The Schlieffen Plan was designed
to win a quick victory for Germany in the West, thereby allowing Germany to turn
its attention to its eastern front before the slower-mobilizing troops of Russia
could threaten Prussia and the rest of Germany. The military plans of France
envisioned a rapidly mounted offensive against Germany to recapture the
provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, and
continue the drive into historically German territory. Tactically as well as
strategically, the French were firmly committed to the virtues of offensive rather
than defensive action. The military plans of Britain eventually overcame a longstanding British hesitation to commit forces to the Continent and came to assume
the landing of a British Expeditionary Force in support of the French (and the
presence of English naval power in the English Channel while French fleets
concentrated on the Mediterranean)—despite the lack of a formal military alliance
between France and Great Britain.
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The section of The Guns of August that follows “Outbreak” is entitled
“Battle.” That section covers the first battles of the war in Belgium and France
(and, to a lesser extent, in the East).
A note on the military technology of the early 20th century may be in order.
The American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865, is often called the first
“modern” war. Strategically, the American Civil War was a lengthy conflict
mobilizing the entire range of economic resources of the warring parties;
operationally, the war involved the large-scale use of railroads for troop
movements and the connection of field armies to their political leadership with
telegraph lines; tactically, the war saw the widespread use of rifled weapons by
infantrymen, which allowed foot soldiers to dominate the battlefield and
necessitated the dispersal of units to a degree vastly different from the close-order
formations of the Napoleonic era. The situation at the outset of World War I did
not appear to the parties to be greatly different from the situation prevailing at the
end of the American Civil War (although both sides believed that the trench
warfare that characterized the later stages of the American Civil War was an
anomaly). The use of railroads to bring troops to the front was the subject of
intricate plans by all sides, as was the mobilization of manpower resources from
peacetime occupations into military service. At the operational and tactical level,
railroads and marching by foot were the dominant methods of transport at the
outset of World War I . Motorized transport—trucks and cars, that is—was in its
infancy and was not integrated into main-line operational military units; the tank
had not yet been invented; and the airplane was a novelty thought to be useful, if
at all, for reconnaissance and communications. The later stages of the war would
see the introduction of the tank and the airplane into combat, and the dominance
of the battlefield by the machine gun, heavy artillery, and trenches. But at the
outset of the war, the participants viewed the conflict as likely to be decided by
the employment of rapidly mobilized masses of rifle-armed infantry transported to
the front by railroad and then proceeding on foot.
The Guns of August, by the way, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1963 for “best
non-fiction” book. (That same year, Maria Goeppert-Mayer became the first
woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics since Madame Curie, and—on a plane
from Dallas, Texas to Washington, DC—Sarah Tilghman Hughes became the
first, and so far the only, woman to swear in a US President.)
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
THE GUNS OF AUGUST
Barbara W. Tuchman
Reproduced for Educational Purposes Only.
No Charge for Distribution.
Copyright © 1963 by Barbara W. Tuchman
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OUTBREAK
“Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans,” Bismarck had predicted,
would ignite the next war. The assassination of the Austrian heir apparent,
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by Serbian nationalists on June 28, 1914, satisfied his
condition. Austria-Hungary, with the bellicose frivolity of senile empires,
determined to use the occasion to absorb Serbia as she had absorbed Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1909. Russia on that occasion, weakened by the war with Japan,
had been forced to acquiesce by a German ultimatum followed by the Kaiser's
appearance in “shining armor,” as he put it, at the side of his ally, Austria. To
avenge that humiliation and for the sake of her prestige as the major Slav power,
Russia was now prepared to put on the shining armor herself. On July 5 Germany
assured Austria that she could count on Germany's “faithful support” if whatever
punitive action she took against Serbia brought her into conflict with Russia. This
was the signal that let loose the irresistible onrush of events. On July 23 Austria
delivered an ultimatum to Serbia, on July 26 rejected the Serbian reply (although
the Kaiser, now nervous, admitted that it “dissipates every reason for war”), on
July 28 declared war on Serbia, on July 29 bombarded Belgrade. On that day
Russia mobilized along her Austrian frontier and on July 30 both Austria and
Russia ordered general mobilization. On July 31 Germany issued an ultimatum to
Russia to demobilize within twelve hours and “make us a distinct declaration to
that effect.”
War pressed against every frontier. Suddenly dismayed, governments
struggled and twisted to fend it off. It was no use. Agents at frontiers were
reporting every cavalry patrol as a deployment to beat the mobilization gun.
General staffs, goaded by their relentless timetables, were pounding the table for
the signal to move lest their opponents gain an hour's head start. Appalled upon
the brink, the chiefs of state who would be ultimately responsible for their
country's fate attempted to back away but the pull of military schedules dragged
them forward.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
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CHAPTER SIX—AUGUST 1: BERLIN
At noon on Saturday, August 1, the German ultimatum to Russia expired
without a Russian reply. Within an hour a telegram went out to the German
ambassador in St. Petersburg instructing him to declare war by five o’clock that
afternoon. At five o’clock the Kaiser decreed general mobilization, some
preliminaries having already got off to a head start under the declaration of
Kriegesgefahr (Danger of War) the day before. At five-thirty Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg, absorbed in a document he was holding in his hand and
accompanied by little Jagow, the Foreign Minister, hurried down the steps of the
Foreign Office, hailed an ordinary taxi, and sped off to the palace. Shortly
afterward General von Moltke, the gloomy Chief of General Staff, was pulled up
short as he was driving back to his office with the mobilization order signed by
the Kaiser in his pocket. A messenger in another car overtook him with an urgent
summons from the palace. He returned to hear a last-minute, desperate proposal
from the Kaiser that reduced Moltke to tears and could have changed the history
of the twentieth century.
Now that the moment had come, the Kaiser suffered at the necessary risk
to East Prussia, in spite of the six weeks’ leeway his Staff promised before the
Russians could fully mobilize. “I hate the Slavs,” he confessed to an Austrian
officer. “I know it is a sin to do so. We ought not to hate anyone. But I can’t help
hating them.” He had taken comfort, however, in the news, reminiscent of 1905,
of strikes and riots in St. Petersburg, of mobs smashing windows, and “violent
street fights between revolutionaries and police.” Count Pourtalès his aged
ambassador, who had been seven years in Russia, concluded, and repeatedly
assured his government, that Russia would not fight for fear of revolution. Captain
von Eggeling, the German military attaché, kept repeating the credo about 1916,
and when Russia nevertheless mobilized, he reported she planned “no tenacious
offensive but a slow retreat as in 1812.” In the affinity for error of German
diplomats, these judgments established a record. They gave heart to the Kaiser,
who as late as July 31 composed a missive for the “guidance” of his Staff,
rejoicing in the “mood of a sick Tom-cat” that, on the evidence of his envoys, he
said prevailed in the Russian court and army.
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In Berlin on August 1, the crowds milling in the streets and massed in
thousands in front of the palace were tense and heavy with anxiety. Socialism,
which most of Berlin’s workers professed, did not run so deep as their instinctive
fear and hatred of the Slavic hordes. Although they had been told by the Kaiser, in
his speech from the balcony announcing Kriegesgefahr the evening before, that
the “sword has been forced into our hand,” they still waited in the ultimate dim
hope of a Russian reply. The hour of the ultimatum passed. A journalist in the
crowd felt the air “electric with rumor. People told each other Russia had asked
for an extension of time. The Bourse writhed in panic. The afternoon passed in
almost insufferable anxiety.” Bethmann-Hollweg issued a statement ending, “If
the iron dice roll, may God help us.” At five o’clock a policeman appeared at the
palace gate and announced mobilization to the crowd, which obediently struck up
the national hymn, “Now thank we all our God.” Cars raced down Unter den
Linden with officers standing up in them, waving handkerchiefs and shouting,
“Mobilization!” Instantly converted from Marx to Mars, people cheered wildly
and rushed off to vent their feelings on suspected Russian spies, several of whom
were pummeled or trampled to death in the course of the next few days.
Once the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for
calling up, equipping, and transporting two million men began turning
automatically. Reservists went to their designated depots, were issued uniforms,
equipment, and arms, formed into companies and companies into battalions, were
joined by cavalry, cyclists, artillery, medical units, cook wagons, blacksmith
wagons, even postal wagons, moved according to prepared railway timetables to
concentration points near the frontier where they would be formed into divisions,
divisions into corps, and corps into armies ready to advance and fight. One army
corps alone—out of the total of 40 in the German forces—required 170 railway
cars for officers, 965 for infantry, 2,960 for cavalry, 1,915 for artillery and supply
wagons, 6,010 in all, grouped in 140 trains and an equal number again for their
supplies. From the moment the order was given, everything was to move at fixed
times according to a schedule precise down to the number of train axles that
would pass over a given bridge within a given time.
Confident in his magnificent system, Deputy Chief of Staff General
Waldersee had not even returned to Berlin at the beginning of the crisis but had
written to Jagow: “I shall remain here ready to jump; we are all prepared at the
General Staff, in the meantime there is nothing for us to do.” It was a proud
tradition inherited from the elder, or “great,” Moltke who on mobilization day in
1870 was found lying on a sofa reading Lady Audley’s Secret.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
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His enviable calm was not present today in the palace. Face to face no
longer with the specter but the reality of a two-front war, the Kaiser was as close
to the “sick Tom-cat” mood as he thought the Russians were. More cosmopolitan
and more timid than the archetype Prussian, he had never actually wanted a
general war. He wanted greater power, greater prestige, above all more authority
in the world’s affairs for Germany but he preferred to obtain them by frightening
rather than by fighting other nations. He wanted the gladiator’s rewards without
the battle, and whenever the prospect of battle came too close, as at Algeciras and
Agadir, he shrank.
As the final crisis boiled, his marginalia on telegrams grew more and more
agitated: “Aha! the common cheat,” “Rot!” “He lies!” “Mr. Grey is a false dog,”
“Twaddle!” “The rascal is crazy or an idiot!” When Russia mobilized he burst
into a tirade of passionate foreboding, not against the Slav traitors but against the
unforgettable figure of the [Kaiser’s late] wicked uncle[, Edward VII, King of
England]: “The world will be engulfed in the most terrible of wars, the ultimate
aim of which is the ruin of Germany. England, France and Russia have conspired
for our annihilation ... that is the naked truth of the situation which was slowly but
surely created by Edward VII. ... The encirclement of Germany is at last an
accomplished fact. We have run our heads into the noose ... The dead Edward is
stronger than the living I!”
Conscious of the shadow of the dead Edward, the Kaiser would have
welcomed any way out of the commitment to fight both Russia and France and,
behind France, the looming figure of still-undeclared England.
....
In Berlin just after five o’clock a telephone rang in the Foreign Office.
Under-Secretary Zimmermann, who answered it, turned to the editor of the
Berliner Tageblatt sitting by his desk and said, “Moltke wants to know whether
things can start.” At that moment a telegram from London, just decoded, broke in
upon the planned proceedings. It offered hope that if the movement against France
could be instantly stopped Germany might safely fight a one-front war after all.
Carrying it with them, Bethmann and Jagow dashed off on their taxi trip to the
palace.
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The telegram, from Prince Lichnowsky, [the German] ambassador in
London, reported an English offer, as Lichnowsky understood it, “that in case we
did not attack France, England would remain neutral and would guarantee
France’s neutrality.”
The ambassador belonged to that class of Germans who spoke English and
copied English manners, sports, and dress, in a strenuous endeavor to become the
very pattern of an English gentleman. His fellow noblemen, the Prince of Pless,
Prince Blucher, and Prince Munster were all married to English wives. At a dinner
in Berlin in 1911, in honor of a British general, the guest of honor was astonished
to find that all forty German guests, including Bethmann-Hollweg and Admiral
Tirpitz, spoke English fluently. Lichnowsky differed from his class in that he was
not only in manner but in heart an earnest Anglophile. He had come to London
determined to make himself and his country liked. English society had been lavish
with country weekends. To the ambassador no tragedy could be greater than war
between the country of his birth and the country of his heart, and he was grasping
at any handle to avert it.
When the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, telephoned him that
morning, in the interval of a Cabinet meeting, Lichnowsky, out of his own
anxiety, interpreted what Grey said to him as an offer by England to stay neutral
and to keep France neutral in a Russo-German war, if, in return, Germany would
promise not to attack France.
Actually, Grey had not said quite that. What, in his elliptical way, he
offered was a promise to keep France neutral if Germany would promise to stay
neutral as against France and Russia, in other words, not go to war against either,
pending the result of efforts to settle the Serbian affair. After eight years as
Foreign Secretary in a period of chronic “Bosnias,” as Bülow called them, Grey
had perfected a manner of speaking designed to convey as little meaning as
possible; his avoidance of the point-blank, said a colleague, almost amounted to
method. Over the telephone, Lichnowsky, himself dazed by the coming tragedy,
would have had no difficulty misunderstanding him.
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The Kaiser clutched at Lichnowsky’s passport to a one-front war. Minutes
counted. Already mobilization was rolling inexorably toward the French frontier.
The first hostile act, seizure of a railway junction in Luxembourg, whose
neutrality the five Great Powers, including Germany, had guaranteed, was
scheduled within an hour. It must be stopped, stopped at once. But how? Where
was Moltke? Moltke had left the palace. An aide was sent off, with siren
screaming, to intercept him. He was brought back.
The Kaiser was himself again, the All-Highest, the War Lord, blazing with
a new idea, planning, proposing, disposing. He read Moltke the telegram and said
in triumph: “Now we can go to war against Russia only. We simply march the
whole of our Army to the East!”
Aghast at the thought of his marvelous machinery of mobilization
wrenched into reverse, Moltke refused point-blank. For the past ten years, first as
assistant to Schlieffen, then as his successor, Moltke’s job had been planning for
this day, The Day, Der Tag, for which all Germany’s energies were gathered, on
which the march to final mastery of Europe would begin. It weighed upon him
with an oppressive, almost unbearable responsibility.
Tall, heavy, bald, and sixty-six years old, Moltke habitually wore an
expression of profound distress which led the Kaiser to call him der traurige
Julius (or what might be rendered “Gloomy Gus”; in fact, his name was
Helmuth). Poor health, for which he took an annual cure at Carlsbad, and the
shadow of a great uncle were perhaps cause for gloom. From his window in the
red brick General Staff building on the Königplatz where he lived as well as
worked, he looked out every day on the equestrian statue of his namesake, the
hero of 1870 and, together with Bismarck, the architect of the German Empire.
The nephew was a poor horseman with a habit of falling off on staff rides and,
worse, a follower of Christian Science with a side interest in anthroposophism and
other cults. For this unbecoming weakness in a Prussian officer he was considered
“soft”; what is more, he painted, played the cello, carried Goethe’s Faust in his
pocket, and had begun a translation of Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande.
Introspective and a doubter by nature, he had said to the Kaiser upon his
appointment in 1906: “I do not know how I shall get on in the event of a
campaign. I am very critical of myself.” Yet he was neither personally nor
politically timid. In 1911, disgusted by Germany’s retreat in the Agadir crisis, he
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wrote to Conrad von Hötzendorff that if things got worse he would resign,
propose to disband the army and “place ourselves under the protection of Japan;
then we can make money undisturbed and turn into imbeciles.” He did not hesitate
to talk back to the Kaiser, but told him “quite brutally” in 1900 that his Peking
expedition was a “crazy adventure,” and when offered the appointment as Chief of
Staff, asked the Kaiser if he expected “to win the big prize twice in the same
lottery”—a thought that had certainly influenced William’s choice. He refused to
take the post unless the Kaiser stopped his habit of winning all the war games
which was making nonsense of maneuvers. Surprisingly, the Kaiser meekly
obeyed.
Now, on the climactic night of August 1, Moltke was in no mood for any
more of the Kaiser’s meddling with serious military matters, or with meddling of
any kind with the fixed arrangements. To turn around the deployment of a million
men from west to east at the very moment of departure would have taken a more
iron nerve than Moltke disposed of. He saw a vision of the deployment crumbling
apart in confusion, supplies here, soldiers there, ammunition lost in the middle,
companies without officers, divisions without staffs, and those 11,000 trains, each
exquisitely scheduled to click over specified tracks at specified intervals of ten
minutes, tangled in a grotesque ruin of the most perfectly planned military
movement in history.
“Your Majesty,” Moltke said to him now, “it cannot be done. The
deployment of millions cannot be improvised. If Your Majesty insists on leading
the whole army to the East it will not be an army ready for battle but a
disorganized mob of armed men with no arrangements for supply. Those
arrangements took a whole year of intricate labor to complete”—and Moltke
closed upon that rigid phrase, the basis for every major German mistake, the
phrase that launched the invasion of Belgium and the submarine war against the
United States, the inevitable phrase when military plans dictate policy—“and once
settled, it cannot be altered.”
In fact it could have been altered. The German General Staff, though
committed since 1905 to a plan of attack upon France first, had in their files,
revised each year until 1913, an alternative plan against Russia with all the trains
running eastward.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
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“Build no more fortresses, build railways,” ordered the elder Moltke who
had laid out his strategy on a railway map and bequeathed the dogma that railways
are the key to war. In Germany the railway system was under military control with
a staff officer assigned to every line; no track could be laid or changed without
permission of the General Staff. Annual mobilization war games kept railway
officials in constant practice and tested their ability to improvise and divert traffic
by telegrams reporting lines cut and bridges destroyed. The best brains produced
by the War College, it was said, went into the railway section and ended up in
lunatic asylums.
When Moltke’s “It cannot be done” was revealed after the war in his
memoirs, General von Staab, Chief of the Railway Division, was so incensed by
what he considered a reproach upon his bureau that he wrote a book to prove it
could have been done. In pages of charts and graphs he demonstrated how, given
notice on August 1, he could have deployed four out of the seven armies to the
Eastern Front by August 15, leaving three to defend the West. Matthias Erzberger,
the Reichstag deputy and leader of the Catholic Centrist Party, has left another
testimony. He says that Moltke himself, within six months of the event, admitted
to him that the assault on France at the beginning was a mistake and instead, “the
larger part of our army ought first to have been sent East to smash the Russian
steam roller, limiting operations in the West to beating off the enemy’s attack on
our frontier.”
On the night of August 1, Moltke, clinging to the fixed plan, lacked the
necessary nerve. “Your uncle would have given me a different answer,” the Kaiser
said to him bitterly. The reproach “wounded me deeply,” Moltke wrote afterward;
“I never pretended to be the equal of the old Field Marshal.” Nevertheless he
continued to refuse. “My protest that it would be impossible to maintain peace
between France and Germany while both countries were mobilized made no
impression. Everybody got more and more excited and I was alone in my
opinion.”
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Finally, when Moltke convinced the Kaiser that the mobilization plan
could not be changed, the group which included Bethmann and Jagow drafted a
telegram to England regretting that Germany’s advance movements toward the
French border “can no longer be altered,” but offering a guarantee not to cross the
border before August 3 at 7:00 P.M., which cost them nothing as no crossing was
scheduled before that time. Jagow rushed off a telegram to his ambassador in
Paris, where mobilization had already been decreed at four o’clock, instructing
him helpfully to “please keep France quiet for the time being.” The Kaiser added a
personal telegram to King George, telling him that for “technical reasons”
mobilization could not be countermanded at this late hour, but “If France offers
me neutrality which must be guaranteed by the British fleet and army, I shall of
course refrain from attacking France and employ my troops elsewhere. I hope
France will not become nervous.”
It was now minutes before seven o’clock, the hour when the 16th Division
was scheduled to move into Luxembourg. Bethmann excitedly insisted that
Luxembourg must not be entered under any circumstances while waiting for the
British answer. Instantly the Kaiser, without asking Moltke, ordered his aide-decamp to telephone and telegraph 16th Division Headquarters at Trier to cancel the
movement. Moltke saw ruin again. Luxembourg’s railways were essential for the
offensive through Belgium against France. “At that moment,” his memoirs say, “I
thought my heart would break.”
Despite all his pleading, the Kaiser refused to budge. Instead, he added a
closing sentence to his telegram to King George, “The troops on my frontier are in
the act of being stopped by telephone and telegraph from crossing into France,” a
slight if vital twist of the truth, for the Kaiser could not acknowledge to England
that what he had intended and what was being stopped was the violation of a
neutral country. It would have implied his intention also to violate Belgium,
which would have been casus belli in England, and England’s mind was not yet
made up.
“Crushed,” Moltke says of himself, on what should have been the
culminating day of his career, he returned to the General Staff and “burst into
bitter tears of abject despair.” When his aide brought him for his signature the
written order canceling the Luxembourg movement, “I threw my pen down on the
table and refused to sign.” To have signed as the first order after mobilization one
that would have annulled all the careful preparations would have been taken, he
knew, as evidence of “hesitancy and irresolution.” “Do what you want with this
telegram,” he said to his aide; “I will not sign it.”
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
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He was still brooding at eleven o’clock when another summons came from
the palace. Moltke found the Kaiser in his bedroom, characteristically dressed for
the occasion, with a military overcoat over his nightshirt. A telegram had come
from Lichnowsky, who, in a further talk with Grey, had discovered his error and
now wired sadly, “A positive proposal by England is, on the whole, not in
prospect.”
“Now you can do what you like,” said the Kaiser, and went back to bed.
Moltke, the Commander in Chief who had now to direct a campaign that would
decide the fate of Germany, was left permanently shaken. “That was my first
experience of the war,” he wrote afterward. “I never recovered from the shock of
this incident. Something in me broke and I was never the same thereafter.”
Neither was the world, he might have added. The Kaiser’s telephone order
to Trier had not arrived in time. At seven o’clock, as scheduled, the first frontier
of the war was crossed, the distinction going to an infantry company of the 69th
Regiment under command of a certain Lieutenant Feldmann. Just inside the
Luxembourg border, on the slopes of the Ardennes about twelve miles from
Bastogne in Belgium, stood a little town known to the Germans as Ulflingen.
Around it cows grazed on the hillside pastures; on its steep, cobblestone streets
not a stray wisp of hay, even in August harvest time, was allowed to offend the
strict laws governing municipal cleanliness in the Grand Duchy. At the foot of the
town was a railroad station and telegraph office where the lines from Germany
and Belgium crossed. This was the German objective which Lieutenant
Feldmann’s company, arriving in automobiles, duly seized.
With their relentless talent for the tactless, the Germans chose to violate
Luxembourg at a place whose native and official name was Trois Vierges. The
three virgins in fact represented faith, hope, and charity, but History with her
apposite touch arranged for the occasion that they should stand in the public mind
for Luxembourg, Belgium, and France.
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At 7:30 a second detachment in automobiles arrived (presumably in
response to the Kaiser’s message) and ordered off the first group, saying “a
mistake had been made.” In the interval Luxembourg’s Minister of State Eyschen
had already telegraphed the news to London, Paris, and Brussels and a protest to
Berlin. The three virgins had made their point. By midnight Moltke had rectified
the reversal, and by the end of the next day, August 2, M-1 on the German
schedule, the entire Grand Duchy was occupied.
A question has haunted the annals of history ever since: What Ifs might
have followed if the Germans had gone east in 1914 while remaining on the
defensive against France? General von Staab showed that to have turned against
Russia was technically possible. But whether it would have been temperamentally
possible for the Germans to have refrained from attacking France when Der Tag
came is another matter.
********************
At seven o’clock in St. Petersburg, at the same hour when the Germans
entered Luxembourg, Ambassador Pourtalès, his watery blue eyes red-rimmed, his
white goatee quivering, presented Germany’s declaration of war with shaking
hand to Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister.
“The curses of the nations will be upon you!” Sazonov exclaimed.
“We are defending our honor,” the German ambassador replied.
“Your honor was not involved. But there is a divine justice.”
“That’s true,” and muttering, “a divine justice, a divine justice,” Pourtalès
staggered to the window, leaned against it, and burst into tears. “So this is the end
of my mission,” he said when he could speak. Sazonov patted him on the
shoulder, they embraced, and Pourtalès stumbled to the door, which he could
hardly open with a trembling hand, and went out, murmuring, “Goodbye,
goodbye.”
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This affecting scene comes down to us as recorded by Sazonov with
artistic additions by the French ambassador Paléologue, presumably from what
Sazonov told him. Pourtalès reported only that he asked three times for a reply to
the ultimatum and after Sazonov answered negatively three times, “I handed over
the note as instructed.”
Why did it have to be handed over at all? Admiral von Tirpitz, the Naval
Minister, had plaintively asked the night before when the declaration of war was
being drafted. Speaking, he says, “more from instinct than from reason,” he
wanted to know why, if Germany did not plan to invade Russia, was it necessary
to declare war and assume the odium of the attacking party? His question was
particularly pertinent because Germany’s object was to saddle Russia with war
guilt in order to convince the German people that they were fighting in selfdefense and especially in order to keep Italy tied to her engagements under the
Triple Alliance.
Italy was obliged to join her allies only in a defensive war and, already
shaky in her allegiance, was widely expected to sidle out through any loophole
that opened up. Bethmann was harassed by this problem. If Austria persisted in
refusing any or all Serbian concessions, he warned, “it will scarcely be possible to
place the guilt of a European conflagration on Russia” and would “place us in the
eyes of our own people, in an untenable position.” He was hardly heard. When
mobilization day came, German protocol required that war be properly declared.
Jurists of the Foreign Office, according to Tirpitz. insisted it was legally the
correct thing to do. “Outside Germany,” he says pathetically, “there is no
appreciation of such ideas.”
In France appreciation was keener than he knew.
16
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
CHAPTER SEVEN—AUGUST 1: PARIS AND LONDON
One prime objective governed French Policy: to enter the war with
England as an ally. To ensure that event and enable her friends in England to
overcome the inertia and reluctance within their own Cabinet and country, France
had to leave it clear beyond question who was the attacked and who the attacker.
The physical act and moral odium of aggression must be left squarely upon
Germany. Germany was expected to do her part, but lest any overanxious French
patrols or frontier troops stepped over the border, the French government took a
daring and extraordinary step. On July 30 it ordered a ten-kilometer withdrawal
along the entire frontier with Germany from Switzerland to Luxembourg.
....
Withdrawal was a bitter gesture to ask of a French Commander in Chief
schooled in the doctrine of offensive and nothing but the offensive. It could have
shattered General Joffre as Moltke’s first experience of the war shattered him, but
General Joffre’s heart did not break.
From the moment of the President’s and Premier’s return, Joffre had been
hounding the government for the order to mobilize or at least take the preliminary
steps: recall of furloughs, of which many had been granted for the harvest, and
deployment of covering troops to the frontier. He deluged them with intelligence
reports of German pre-mobilization measures already taken. He loomed large in
authority before a new-born Cabinet, the tenth in five years, whose predecessor
had lasted three days. The present one was remarkable chiefly for having most of
France’s strong men outside it. Briand, Clemenceau, Caillaux, all former
premiers, were in opposition. Viviani, by his own evidence, was in a state of
“frightful nervous tension” which, according to Messimy, who was once again
War Minister, “became a permanent condition during the month of August.” The
Minister of Marine, Dr. Gauthier, a doctor of medicine shoved into the naval post
when a political scandal removed his predecessor, was so overwhelmed by events
that he “forgot” to order fleet units into the Channel and had to be replaced by the
Minister of Public Instruction on the spot.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
17
In the President, however, intelligence, experience, and strength of
purpose, if not constitutional power, were combined. Poincaré was a lawyer,
economist, and member of the Academy, a former Finance Minister who had
served as Premier and Foreign Minister in 1912 and had been elected President of
France in January, 1913. Character begets power, especially in hours of crisis, and
the untried Cabinet leaned willingly on the abilities and strong will of the man
who was constitutionally a cipher. Born in Lorraine, Poincaré could remember as
a boy of ten the long line of spiked German helmets marching through Bar-leDuc, his home town. He was credited by the Germans with the most bellicose
intent, partly because, as Premier at the time of Agadir, he had held firm, partly
because as President he had used his influence to push through the Three-Year
Military Service Law in 1913 against violent Socialist opposition. This and his
cold demeanor, his lack of flamboyance, his fixity, did not make for popularity at
home. Elections were going against the government, the Three-Year Law was near
to being thrown out, labor troubles and farmers’ discontent were rife, July had
been hot, wet, and oppressive with windstorms and summer thunder, and Mme.
Caillaux who had shot the editor of Figaro was on trial for murder. Each day of
the trial revealed new and unpleasant irregularities in finance, the press, the
courts, the government.
One day the French woke up to find Mme. Caillaux on page two—and the
sudden, awful knowledge that France faced war. In that most passionately
political and quarrelsome of countries one sentiment thereupon prevailed.
Poincaré and Viviani, returning from Russia, drove through Paris to the sound of
one prolonged cry, repeated over and over, “Vive la France!”
Joffre told the government that if he was not given the order to assemble
and transport the covering troops of five army corps and cavalry toward the
frontier, the Germans would “enter France without firing a shot.” He accepted the
ten-kilometer withdrawal of troops already in position less from subservience to
the civil arm—Joffre was about as subservient by nature as Julius Caesar—as
from a desire to bend all the force of his argument upon the one issue of the
covering troops. The government, still reluctant while diplomatic offers and
counter-offers flashing over the wires might yet produce a settlement, agreed to
give him a “reduced” version, that is, without calling out the reservists.
18
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
At 4:30 next day, July 31, a banking friend in Amsterdam telephoned
Messimy the news of the German Kriegesgefahr, officially confirmed an hour
later from Berlin. It was “une forme hypocrite de la mobilisation,” Messimy
angrily told the Cabinet. His friend in Amsterdam had said war was certain and
Germany was ready for it, “from the Emperor down to the last Fritz.” Following
hard upon this news came a telegram from Paul Cambon, French ambassador in
London, reporting that England was “tepid.” Cambon had devoted every day of
the past sixteen years at his post to the single end of ensuring England’s active
support when the time came, but he had now to wire that the British government
seemed to be awaiting some new development. The dispute so far was of “no
interest to Great Britain.”
Joffre arrived, with a new memorandum on German movements, to insist
upon mobilization. He was permitted to send his full “covering order” but no
more, as news had also come of a last-minute appeal from the Czar to the Kaiser.
The Cabinet continued sitting, with Messimy champing in impatience at the
“green baize routine” which stipulated that each minister must speak in turn.
At seven o’clock in the evening Baron von Schoen, making his eleventh
visit to the French Foreign Office in seven days, presented Germany’s demand to
know what course France would take and said he would return next day at one
o’clock for an answer. Still the Cabinet sat and argued over financial measures,
recall of Parliament, declaration of a state of siege, while all Paris waited in
suspense. One crazed young man cracked under the agony, held a pistol against a
café window, and shot dead Jean Jaurès, whose leadership in international
socialism and in the fight against the Three-Year Law had made him, in the eyes
of superpatriots, a symbol of pacifism.
A white-faced aide broke in upon the Cabinet at nine o’clock with the
news. Jaurès killed! The event, pregnant with possible civil strife, stunned the
Cabinet. Street barricades, riot, even revolt became a prospect on the threshold of
war. Ministers reopened the heated argument whether to invoke Carnet B, the list
of known agitators, anarchists, pacifists, and suspected spies who were to be
arrested automatically upon the day of mobilization. Both the Prefect of Police
and former Premier Clemenceau had advised the Minister of Interior, M. Malvy,
to enforce Carnet B. Viviani and others of his colleagues, hoping to preserve
national unity, were opposed to it. They held firm. Some foreigners suspected of
being spies were arrested, but no Frenchmen. In case of riot, troops were alerted
that night, but next morning there was only deep grief and deep quiet. Of the
2,501 persons listed in Carnet B, 80 per cent were ultimately to volunteer for
military service.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
19
At 2:00 A.M. that night, President Poincaré was awakened in bed by the
irrepressible Russian ambassador, Isvolsky, a former hyperactive foreign minister.
“Very distressed and very agitated,” he wanted to know, “What is France going to
do?”
Isvolsky had no doubts of Poincaré’s attitude, but he and other Russian
statesmen were always haunted by the fear that when the time came the French
Parliament, which had never been told the terms of the military alliance with
Russia, would fail to ratify it. The terms specifically stated, “If Russia is attacked
by Germany or by Austria supported by Germany, France will use all her available
forces to attack Germany.” As soon as either Germany or Austria mobilized,
“France and Russia, without previous agreement being necessary, shall mobilize
all their forces immediately and simultaneously and shall transport them as near
the frontiers as possible.... These forces shall begin complete action with all speed
so that Germany will have to fight at the same time in the East and in the West.”
These terms appeared unequivocal but, as Isvolsky had anxiously queried
Poincaré in 1912, would the French Parliament recognize the obligation? In
Russia the Czar’s power was absolute, so that France “may be sure of us,” but “in
France the Government is impotent without Parliament. Parliament does not know
the text of 1892. ... What guarantee have we that your Parliament would follow
your Government’s lead?”
“If Germany attacked,” Poincaré had replied on that earlier occasion,
Parliament would follow the Government “without a doubt.”
Now, facing Isvolsky again in the middle of the night, Poincaré assured
him that a Cabinet would be called within a few hours to supply the answer. At
the same hour the Russian military attaché in full diplomatic dress appeared in
Messimy’s bedroom to pose the same question. Messimy telephoned to Premier
Viviani who, though exhausted by the night’s events, had not yet gone to bed.
“Good God!” he exploded, “these Russians are worse insomniacs than they are
drinkers,” and he excitedly recommended “Du calme, du calme et encore du
calme!”
Pressed by the Russians to declare themselves, and by Joffre to mobilize,
yet held to a standstill by the need to prove to England that France would act only
20
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
in self-defense, the French government found calm not easy. At 8:00 next
morning, August 1, Joffre came to the War Office in the Rue St. Dominique to
beg Messimy, in “a pathetic tone that contrasted with his habitual calm,” to pry
mobilization from the government. He named four o’clock as the last moment
when the order could reach the General Post Office for dispatch by telegraph
throughout France in time for mobilization to begin at midnight. He went with
Messimy to the Cabinet at 9:00 A.M. and presented an ultimatum of his own:
every further delay of twenty-four hours before general mobilization would mean
a fifteen- to twenty-kilometer loss of territory, and he would refuse to take the
responsibility as Commander. He left, and the Cabinet faced the problem.
Poincaré was for action; Viviani, representing the antiwar tradition, still hoped
that time would provide a solution. At 11:00 he was called to the Foreign Office
to see von Schoen who in his own anxiety had arrived two hours early for the
answer to Germany’s question of the previous day: whether France would stay
neutral in a Russo-German war. “My question is rather naïve,” said the unhappy
ambassador, “for we know you have a treaty of alliance.”
“Evidemment,” replied Viviani, and gave the answer prearranged between
him and Poincaré. “France will act in accordance with her interests.” As Schoen
left, Isvolsky rushed in with news of the German ultimatum to Russia. Viviani
returned to the Cabinet, which at last agreed upon mobilization. The order was
signed and given to Messimy, but Viviani, still hoping for some saving
development to turn up within the few remaining hours, insisted that Messimy
keep it in his pocket until 3:30. At the same time the ten-kilometer withdrawal
was reaffirmed. Messimy telephoned it that evening personally to corps
commanders: “By order of the President of the Republic, no unit of the army, no
patrol, no reconnaissance, no scout, no detail of any kind, shall go east of the line
laid down. Anyone guilty of transgressing will be liable to court-martial.” A
particular warning was added for the benefit of the XXth Corps, commanded by
General Foch, of whom it was reliably reported that a squadron of cuirassiers had
been seen “nose to nose” with a squadron of Uhlans.
At 3:30, as arranged, General Ebener of Joffre’s staff, accompanied by two
officers, came to the War Office to call for the mobilization order. Messimy
handed it over in dry-throated silence. “Conscious of the gigantic and infinite
results to spread from that little piece of paper, all four of us felt our hearts
tighten.” He shook hands with each of the three officers, who saluted and departed
to deliver the order to the Post Office.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
21
At four o’clock the first poster appeared on the walls of Paris (at the comer
of the Place de la Concorde and the Rue Royale, one still remains, preserved
under glass). At Armenonville, rendezvous of the haut-monde in the Bois de
Boulogne, tea dancing suddenly stopped when the manager stepped forward,
silenced the orchestra, and announced: “Mobilization has been ordered. It begins
at midnight. Play the ‘Marseillaise.”’ In town the streets were already emptied of
vehicles requisitioned by the War Office. Groups of reservists with bundles and
farewell bouquets of flowers were marching off to the Gare de l’Est, as civilians
waved and cheered. One group stopped to lay its flowers at the feet of the blackdraped statue of Strasbourg in the Place de la Concorde. The crowds wept and
cried “Vive I’Alsace!” and tore off the mourning she had worn since 1870.
Orchestras in restaurants played the French, Russian, and British anthems. “To
think these are all being played by Hungarians,” someone remarked. The playing
of their anthem, as if to express a hope, made Englishmen in the crowd
uncomfortable and none more so than Sir Francis Bertie, the pink and plump
British ambassador who in a gray frock coat and gray top hat, holding a green
parasol against the sun, was seen entering the Quai d’Orsay. Sir Francis felt “sick
at heart and ashamed.” He ordered the gates of his embassy closed, for, as he
wrote in his diary, “though it is ‘Vive l’Angleterre’ today, it may be ‘Perfide
Albion’ tomorrow.”
********************
In London that thought hung heavily in the room where small, whitebearded M. Cambon confronted Sir Edward Grey. When Grey said to him that
some “new development” must be awaited because the dispute between Russia,
Austria, and Germany concerned a matter “of no interest” to Great Britain,
Cambon let a glint of anger penetrate his impeccable tact and polished dignity.
Was England “going to wait until French territory was invaded before
intervening?” he asked, and suggested that if so her help might be “very belated.”
Grey, behind his tight mouth and Roman nose, was in equal anguish. He
believed fervently that England’s interests required her to support France; he was
prepared, in fact, to resign if she did not; he believed events to come would force
her hand, but as yet he could say nothing officially to Cambon. Nor had he the
knack of expressing himself unofficially. His manner, which the English public,
22
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
seeing in him the image of the strong, silent man, found comforting, his foreign
colleagues found “icy.” He managed only to express edgily the thought that was in
everyone’s mind, that “Belgian neutrality might become a factor.” That was the
development Grey—and not he alone—was waiting for.
Britain’s predicament resulted from a split personality evident both within
the Cabinet and between the parties. The Cabinet was divided, in a split that
derived from the Boer War, between Liberal Imperialists represented by Asquith,
Grey, Haldane, and Churchill, and “Little Englanders” represented by all the rest.
Heirs of Gladstone, they, like their late leader, harbored a deep suspicion of
foreign entanglements and considered the aiding of oppressed peoples to be the
only proper concern of foreign affairs, which were otherwise regarded as a
tiresome interference with Reform, Free Trade, Home Rule, and the Lords’ Veto.
They tended to regard France as the decadent and frivolous grasshopper, and
would have liked to regard Germany as the industrious, respectable ant, had not
the posturings and roarings of the Kaiser and the Pan-German militarists
somehow discouraged this view. They would never have supported a war on
behalf of France, although the injection of Belgium, a “little” country with a just
call on British protection, might alter the issue.
Grey’s group in the Cabinet, on the other hand, shared with the Tories a
fundamental premise that Britain’s national interest was bound up with the
preservation of France. The reasoning was best expressed in the marvelously flat
words of Grey himself: “If Germany dominated the Continent it would be
disagreeable to us as well as to others, for we should be isolated.” In this epic
sentence is all of British policy, and from it followed the knowledge that, if the
challenge were flung, England would have to fight to prevent that “disagreeable”
outcome. But Grey could not say so without provoking a split in the Cabinet and
in the country that would be fatal to any war effort before it began.
Alone in Europe Britain had no conscription. In war she would be
dependent on voluntary enlistment. A secession from the government over the war
issue would mean the formation of an antiwar party led by the dissidents with
disastrous effect on recruiting. If it was the prime objective of France to enter war
with Britain as an ally, it was a prime necessity for Britain to enter war with a
united government.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
23
This was the touchstone of the problem. In Cabinet meetings the group
opposed to intervention proved strong. Their leader Lord Morley, Gladstone’s old
friend and biographer, believed he could count on “eight or nine likely to agree
with us” against the solution being openly worked for by Churchill with
“daemonic energy” and Grey with “strenuous simplicity.” From discussions in the
Cabinet it was clear to Morley that the neutrality of Belgium was “secondary to
the question of our neutrality in the struggle between Germany and France.” It was
equally clear to Grey that only violation of Belgium’s neutrality would convince
the peace party of the German menace and the need to go to war in the national
interest.
On August 1 the crack was visible and widening in Cabinet and
Parliament. That day twelve out of eighteen Cabinet members declared
themselves opposed to giving France the assurance of Britain’s support in war.
That afternoon in the lobby of the House of Commons a caucus of Liberal M.P.s
voted 19 to 4 (though with many abstentions) for a motion that England should
remain neutral “whatever happened in Belgium or elsewhere.” That week Punch
published “Lines designed to represent the views of an average British patriot”:
Why should I follow your fighting line
For a matter that’s no concern of mine? . . .
I shall be asked to a general scrap
All over the European map,
Dragged into somebody else’s war
For that’s what a double entente is for.
The average patriot had already used up his normal supply of excitement
and indignation in the current Irish crisis. The “Curragh Mutiny” was England’s
Mme. Caillaux. As a result of the Home Rule Bill, Ulster was threatening armed
rebellion against autonomy for Ireland and English troops stationed at the Curragh
had refused to take up arms against Ulster loyalists. General Gough, the Curragh
commander, had resigned with all his officers, whereupon Sir John French, Chief
of General Staff, resigned, whereupon Colonel John Seely, Haldane’s successor as
Secretary of War, resigned. The army seethed, uproar and schism ruled the
country, and a Palace Conference of party leaders with the King met in vain.
Lloyd George talked ominously of the “gravest issue raised in this country since
24
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
the days of the Stuarts,” the words “civil war” and “rebellion” were mentioned,
and a German arms firm hopefully ran a cargo of 40,000 rifles and a million
cartridges into Ulster. In the meantime there was no Secretary of War, the office
being left to Prime Minister Asquith, who had little time and less inclination for it.
Asquith had, however, a particularly active First Lord of the Admiralty.
When he smelled battle afar off, Winston Churchill resembled the war horse in
Job who turned not back from the sword but “paweth in the valley and saith
among the trumpets, Ha, ha.” He was the only British minister to have a perfectly
clear conviction of what Britain should do and to act upon it without hesitation.
On July 26, the day Austria rejected Serbia’s reply and ten days before his own
government made up its mind, Churchill issued a crucial order.
On July 26 the British fleet was completing, unconnected with the crisis, a
test mobilization and maneuvers with full crews at war strength. At seven o’clock
next morning the squadrons were due to disperse, some to various exercises on
the high seas, some to home ports where parts of their crews would be discharged
back into training schools, some to dock for repairs. That Sunday, July 26, the
First Lord remembered later was “a very beautiful day.” When he learned the
news from Austria he made up his mind to make sure “that the diplomatic
situation did not get ahead of the naval situation and that the Grand Fleet should
be in its War Station before Germany could know whether or not we should be in
the war and therefore if possible before we had decided ourselves.” The italics are
his own. After consultation with the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg,
he gave orders to the fleet not to disperse.
He then informed Grey what he had done and with Grey’s assent released
the Admiralty order to the newspapers in the hope that the news might have “a
sobering effect” on Berlin and Vienna.
Holding the fleet together was not enough; it must be got, as Churchill
expressed it in capitals, to its “War Station.” The primary duty of a fleet, as
Admiral Mahan, the Clausewitz of naval warfare, had decreed, was to remain “a
fleet in being.” In the event of war the British fleet, upon which an island nation
depended for its life, had to establish and maintain mastery of the ocean trade
routes; it had to protect the British Isles from invasion; it had to protect the
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
25
Channel and the French coasts in fulfillment of the pact with France; it had to
keep concentrated in sufficient strength to win any engagement if the German
fleet sought battle; and above all it had to guard itself against that new and
menacing weapon of unknown potential, the torpedo. The fear of a sudden,
undeclared torpedo attack haunted the Admiralty.
On July 28 Churchill gave orders for the fleet to sail to its war base at
Scapa Flow, far to the north at the tip of mist-shrouded Orkney in the North Sea.
It steamed out of Portland on the 29th, and by nightfall eighteen miles of warships
had passed northward through the Straits of Dover headed not so much for some
rendezvous with glory as for a rendezvous with discretion. “A surprise torpedo
attack” wrote the First Lord, “was at any rate one nightmare gone forever.”
Having prepared the fleet for action, Churchill turned his abounding
energy and sense of urgency upon preparing the country. He persuaded Asquith on
July 29 to authorize the Warning Telegram which was the arranged signal sent by
War Office and Admiralty to initiate the Precautionary Period. While short of the
Kriegesgefahr or the French State of Siege which established martial law, the
Precautionary Period has been described as a device “invented by a genius . . .
which permitted certain measures to be taken on the ipse dixit of the Secretary of
War without reference to the Cabinet . . . when time was the only thing that
mattered.”
Time pressed on the restless Churchill who, expecting the Liberal
government to break apart, went off to make overtures to his old party, the Tories.
Coalition was not in the least to the taste of the Prime Minister who was bent on
keeping his government united. Lord Morley at seventy-six was expected by no
one to stay with the government in the event of war. Not Morley but the far more
vigorous Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George, was the key figure whom
the government could not afford to lose, both for his proved ability in office and
his influence upon the electorate. Shrewd, ambitious, and possessed of a
spellbinding Welsh eloquence, Lloyd George leaned to the peace group but might
jump either way. He had suffered recent setbacks in public popularity; he saw a
new rival for party leadership arising in the individual whom Lord Morley called
“that splendid condottierre at the Admiralty”; and he might, some of his
colleagues thought, see political advantage in “playing the peacecard” against
Churchill. He was altogether an uncertain and dangerous quantity.
26
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
Asquith, who had no intention of leading a divided country into war,
continued to wait with exasperating patience for events which might convince the
peace group. The question of the hour, he recorded in his passionless way in his
diary for July 31, was, “Are we to go in or stand aside. Of course everybody longs
to stand aside.” In a less passive attitude, Grey, during the Cabinet of July 31
almost reached the point-blank. He said Germany’s policy was that of a
“European aggressor as bad as Napoleon” (a name that for England had only one
meaning) and told the Cabinet that the time had come when a decision whether to
support the Entente or preserve neutrality could no longer be deferred. He said
that if it chose neutrality he was not the man to carry out such a policy. His
implied threat to resign echoed as if it had been spoken.
“The Cabinet seemed to heave a sort of sigh,” wrote one of them, and sat
for several moments in “breathless silence.” Its members looked at one another,
suddenly realizing that their continued existence as a government was now in
doubt. They adjourned without reaching a decision.
That Friday, eve of the August Bank Holiday weekend, the Stock
Exchange closed down at 10:00 A.M. in a wave of financial panic that had started
in New York when Austria declared war on Serbia and which was closing
Exchanges all over Europe. The City trembled, prophesying doom and the
collapse of foreign exchange. Bankers and businessmen, according to Lloyd
George, were “aghast” at the idea of war which would “break down the whole
system of credit with London at its center.” The Governor of the Bank of England
called on Saturday to inform Lloyd George that the City was “totally opposed to
our intervening” in a war.
That same Friday the Tory leaders were being rounded up and called back
to London from country houses to confer on the crisis. Dashing from one to the
other, pleading, exhorting, expounding Britain’s shame if the shilly-shallying
Liberals held back now, was Henry Wilson, the heart, soul, spirit, backbone, and
legs of the Anglo-French military “conversations.” The agreed euphemism for the
joint plans of the General Staffs was “conversations.” The formula of “no
commitment” which Haldane had first established, which had raised misgivings in
Campbell-Bannerman, which Lord Esher had rejected, and which Grey had
embodied in the 1912 letter to Cambon still represented the official position, even
if it did not make sense.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
27
It made very little. If, as Clausewitz justly said, war is a continuation of
national policy, so also are war plans. The Anglo-French war plans, worked out in
detail over a period of nine years, were not a game, or an exercise in fantasy or a
paper practice to keep military minds out of other mischief. They were a
continuation of policy or they were nothing. They were no different from France’s
arrangements with Russia or Germany’s with Austria except for the final legal
fiction that they did not “commit” Britain to action. Members of the government
and Parliament who disliked the policy simply shut their eyes and mesmerized
themselves into believing the fiction.
M. Cambon, visiting Opposition leaders after his painful interview with
Grey, now dropped diplomatic tact altogether. “All our plans are arranged in
common. Our General Staffs have consulted. You have seen all our schemes and
preparations. Look at our fleet! Our whole fleet is in the Mediterranean in
consequence of our arrangements with you and our coasts are open to the enemy.
You have laid us wide open!” He told them that if England did not come in France
would never forgive her, and ended with a bitter cry, “Et l’honneur? Est-ce-que
l’Angleterre comprend ce que c’est l’honneur?”
Honor wears different coats to different eyes, and Grey knew it would
have to wear a Belgian coat before the peace group could be persuaded to see it.
That same afternoon he dispatched two telegrams asking the French and German
governments for a formal assurance that they were prepared to respect Belgian
neutrality “so long as no other power violates it.” Within an hour of receiving the
telegram in the late evening of July 31, France replied in the affirmative. No reply
was received from Germany.
Next day, August 1, the matter was put before the Cabinet. Lloyd George
traced with his finger on a map what he thought would be the German route
through Belgium, just across the near corner, on the shortest straight line to Paris;
it would only, he said, be a “little violation.” When Churchill asked for authority
to mobilize the fleet, that is, call up all the naval reserves, the Cabinet, after a
“sharp discussion,” refused. When Grey asked for authority to implement the
promises made to the French Navy, Lord Morley, John Burns, Sir John Simon,
and Lewis Harcourt proposed to resign. Outside the Cabinet, rumors were swirling
of the last-minute wrestlings of Kaiser and Czar and of the German ultimatums.
Grey left the room to speak to—and be misunderstood by—Lichnowsky on the
telephone, and unwittingly to be the cause of havoc in the heart of General
Moltke. He also saw Cambon, and told him “France must take her own decision at
28
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
this moment without reckoning on an assistance we are not now in a position to
give.” He returned to the Cabinet while Cambon, white and shaking, sank into a
chair in the room of his old friend Sir Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent UnderSecretary. “Ils vont nous lacher” (They are going to desert us), he said. To the
editor of The Times who asked him what he was going to do, he replied, “I am
going to wait to learn if the word ‘honor’ should be erased from the English
dictionary.”
In the Cabinet no one wanted to burn his bridges. Resignations were
bruited, not yet offered. Asquith continued to sit tight, say little, and await
developments as that day of crossed wires and complicated frenzy drew to a close.
That evening Moltke was refusing to go east, Lieutenant Feldmann’s’s company
was seizing Trois Vierges in Luxembourg, Messimy over the telephone was
reconfirming the ten-kilometer withdrawal, and at the Admiralty the First Lord
was entertaining friends from the Opposition, among them the future Lords
Beaverbrook and Birkenhead. To keep occupied while waiting out the tension,
they played bridge after dinner. During the game a messenger brought in a red
dispatch box—it happened to be one of the largest size. Taking a key from his
pocket, Churchill opened it, took out the single sheet of paper it contained, and
read the single line on the paper: “Germany has declared war on Russia.” He
informed the company, changed out of his dinner jacket, and “went straight out
like a man going to a well-accustomed job.”
Churchill walked across the Horse Guards Parade to Downing Street,
entered by the garden gate, and found the Prime Minister upstairs with Grey,
Haldane, now Lord Chancellor, and Lord Crewe, Secretary for India. He told them
he intended “instantly to mobilize the fleet notwithstanding the Cabinet decision.”
Asquith said nothing but appeared, Churchill thought, “quite content.” Grey,
accompanying Churchill on his way out, said to him, “I have just done a very
important thing. I have told Cambon that we shall not allow the German fleet to
come into the Channel.” Or that is what Churchill, experiencing the perils of
verbal intercourse with Grey, understood him to say. It meant that the fleet was
now committed. Whether Grey said he had given the promise or whether he said,
as scholars have since decided, that he was going to give it the next day, is not
really relevant, for whichever it was it merely confirmed Churchill in a decision
already taken. He returned to the Admiralty and “gave forthwith the order to
mobilize.”
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
29
Both his order and Grey’s promise to make good the naval agreement with
France were contrary to majority Cabinet sentiment. On the next day the Cabinet
would have to ratify these acts or break apart, and by that time Grey expected a
“development” to come out of Belgium. Like the French, he felt that he could
count on Germany to provide it.
30
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
QUESTION
In the description above, what role does international law play in
international politics? (I suggest that you make a list of all the places in the text at
which international law is mentioned; for each place where international law is
mentioned, you should briefly describe, inter alia, whether those involved treated
international legal obligations seriously.)
CHAPTER EIGHT—ULTIMATUM IN BRUSSELS
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
31
Locked in the safe of Herr Von below Saleske, German Minister in
Brussels, was a sealed envelope brought to him by special courier from Berlin on
July 29 with orders “not to open until you are instructed by telegraph from here.”
On Sunday, August 2, Below was advised by telegram to open the envelope at
once and deliver the Note it contained by eight o’clock that evening, taking care to
give the Belgian government “the impression that all the instructions relating to
this affair reached you for the first time today.” He was to demand a reply from
the Belgians within twelve hours and wire it to Berlin “as quickly as possible” and
also “forward it immediately by automobile to General von Emmich at the Union
Hotel in Aachen.” Aachen or Aix-la-Chapelle was the nearest German city to
Liège, the eastern gateway to Belgium.
Herr von Below, a tall, erect bachelor with pointed black mustaches and a
jade cigarette holder in constant use, had taken up his post in Belgium early in
1914. When visitors to the German Legation asked him about a silver ash tray
pierced by a bullet hole that lay on his desk, he would laugh and reply: “I am a
bird of ill omen. When I was stationed in Turkey they had a revolution. When I
was in China, it was the Boxers. One of their shots through the window made that
bullet hole.” He would raise his cigarette delicately to his lips with a wide and
elegant gesture and add: “But now I am resting. Nothing ever happens in
Brussels.”
Since the sealed envelope arrived, he had been resting no longer. At noon
on August 1 he received a visit from Baron de Bassompierre, Under-Secretary of
the Belgian Foreign Office, who told him the evening papers intended to publish
France’s reply to Grey in which she promised to respect Belgian neutrality.
Bassompierre suggested that in the absence of a comparable German reply, Herr
von Below might wish to make a statement. Below was without authority from
Berlin to do so. Taking refuge in diplomatic maneuver, he lay back in his chair
and with his eyes fixed on the ceiling repeated back word for word through a haze
of cigarette smoke everything that Bassompierre had just said to him as if playing
back a record. Rising, he assured his visitor that “Belgium had nothing to fear
from Germany,” and closed the interview.
Next morning he repeated the assurance to M. Davignon, the Foreign
Minister, who had been awakened at 6:00 A.M. by news of the German invasion
of Luxembourg and had asked for an explanation. Back at the legation, Below
32
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
soothed a clamoring press with a felicitous phrase that was widely quoted, “Your
neighbor’s roof may catch fire but your own house will be safe.”
Many Belgians, official and otherwise, were disposed to believe him, some
from pro-German sympathies, some from wishful thinking, and some from simple
confidence in the good faith of the international guarantors of Belgium’s
neutrality. In seventy-five years of guaranteed independence they had known
peace for the longest unbroken period in their history. The territory of Belgium
had been the pathway of warriors since Caesar fought the Belgae. In Belgium,
Charles the Bold of Burgundy and Louis XI of France had fought out their long
and bitter rivalry; there Spain had ravaged the Low Countries; there Marlborough
had fought the French at the “very murderous battle” of Malplaquet; there
Napoleon had met Wellington at Waterloo; there the people had risen against
every ruler—Burgundian, French, Spanish, Hapsburg, or Dutch—until the final
revolt against the House of Orange in 1830. Then, under Leopold of Saxe-Coburg,
maternal uncle of Queen Victoria, as King, they had made themselves a nation,
grown prosperous, spent their energies in fraternal fighting between Flemings and
Walloons, Catholics and Protestants, and in disputes over Socialism and French
and Flemish bilingualism, in the fervent hope that their neighbors would leave
them to continue undisturbed in this happy condition.
The King and Prime Minister and Chief of Staff could no longer share the
general confidence, but were prevented, both by the duties of neutrality and by
their belief in neutrality, from making plans to repel attack. Up until the last
moment they could not bring themselves to believe an invasion by one of their
guarantors would actually happen. On reaming of the German Kriegesgefahr on
July 31, they had ordered mobilization of the Belgian Army to begin at midnight.
During the night and next day policemen went from house to house ringing
doorbells and handing out orders while men scrambled out of bed or left their
jobs, wrapped up their bundles, said their farewells, and went off to their
regimental depots. Because Belgium, maintaining her strict neutrality, had not up
to now settled on any plan of campaign, mobilization was not directed against a
particular enemy or oriented in a particular direction. It was a call-up without
deployment. Belgium was obligated, as well as her guarantors, to preserve her
own neutrality and could make no overt act until one was made against her.
When, by the evening of August 1, Germany’s silence in response to
Grey’s request had continued for twenty-four hours, King Albert determined on a
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
33
final private appeal to the Kaiser. He composed it in consultation with his wife,
Queen Elizabeth, a German by birth, the daughter of a Bavarian duke, who
translated it sentence by sentence into German, weighing with the King the choice
of words and their shades of meaning. It recognized that “political objections”
might stand in the way of a public statement but hoped “the bonds of kinship and
friendship” would decide the Kaiser to give King Albert his personal and private
assurance of respect for Belgian neutrality. The kinship in question, which
stemmed from King Albert’s mother, Princess Marie of HohenzollernSigmaringen, a distant and Catholic branch of the Prussian royal family, failed to
move the Kaiser to reply.
Instead came the ultimatum that had been waiting in Herr von Below’s
safe for the last four days. It was delivered at seven on the evening of August 2
when a footman at the Foreign Office pushed his head through the door of the
Under-Secretary’s room and reported in an excited whisper, “The German
Minister has just gone in to see M. Davignon!” Fifteen minutes later Below was
seen driving back down the Rue de la Loi holding his hat in his hand, beads of
perspiration on his forehead, and smoking with the rapid, jerky movements of a
mechanical toy. The instant his “haughty silhouette” had been seen to leave the
Foreign Office, the two Under-Secretaries rushed in to the Minister’s room where
they found M. Davignon, a man until now of immutable and tranquil optimism,
looking extremely pale. “Bad news, bad news,” he said, handing them the German
note he had just received. Baron de Gaiffier, the Political Secretary, read it aloud,
translating slowly as he went, while Bassompierre, sitting at the Minister’s desk
took it down, discussing each ambiguous phrase to make sure of the right
rendering. While they worked, M. Davignon and his Permanent Under-Secretary,
Baron van der Elst, listened, sitting in two chairs on either side of the fireplace.
M. Davignon’s last word on any problem had always been, “I am sure it will turn
out all right” while van der Elst’s esteem for the Germans had led him in the past
to assure his government that rising German armaments were intended only for
the Drang nach Osten and portended no trouble for Belgium.
Baron de Broqueville, Premier and concurrently War Minister, entered the
room as the work concluded, a tall, dark gentleman of elegant grooming whose
resolute air was enhanced by an energetic black mustache and expressive black
eyes. As the ultimatum was read to him everyone in the room listened to each
34
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
word with the same intensity that the authors had put into the drafting. It had been
drawn up with great care, with perhaps a subconscious sense that it was to be one
of the critical documents of the century.
General Moltke had written the original version in his own hand on July
26, two days before Austria declared war on Serbia, four days before Austria and
Russia mobilized, and on the same day when Germany and Austria had rejected
Sir Edward Grey’s proposal for a five-power conference. Moltke had sent his draft
to the Foreign Office, where it was revised by Under-Secretary Zimmermann and
Political Secretary Stumm, further corrected and modified by Foreign Minister
Jagow and Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg before the final draft was sent in the
sealed envelope to Brussels on the 29th. The extreme pains the Germans took
reflected the importance they attached to the document.
Germany had received “reliable information,” the note began, of a
proposed advance by the French along the route Givet-Namur, “leaving no doubt
of France’s intention to advance against Germany through Belgian territory. (As
the Belgians had seen no evidence of French movement toward Namur, for the
excellent reason that there was none, the charge failed to impress them.) Germany,
the note continued, being unable to count on the Belgian Army halting the French
advance, was required by “the dictate of self-preservation” to “anticipate this
hostile attack.” She would view it with “deepest regret” if Belgium should regard
her entrance on Belgian soil as “an act of hostility against herself.” If Belgium
should, on the other hand, adopt “a benevolent neutrality,” Germany would bind
herself to “evacuate her territory as soon as peace shall have been concluded,” to
pay for any damages caused by German troops, and to “guarantee at the
conclusion of peace the sovereign rights and independence of the kingdom.” In
the original the sentence had continued, “and to favor with the greatest goodwill
any possible claims of Belgium for compensation at the expense of France.” At
the last moment Below was instructed to delete this bribe.
If Belgium opposed Germany’s passage through her territory, the note
concluded, she would be regarded as an enemy, and future relations with her
would be left to “the decision of arms.” An “unequivocal answer” was demanded
within twelve hours.
“A long, tragic silence of several minutes” followed the reading,
Bassompierre recalled, as each man in the room thought of the choice that faced
his country. Small in size and young in independence, Belgium clung more
fiercely to independence for that reason. But no one in the room needed to be told
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
35
what the consequences of a decision to defend it would be. Their country would
be subjected to attack, their homes to destruction, their people to reprisals by a
force ten times their size with no doubt of the outcome to themselves, who were
in the immediate pathway of the Germans, whatever the ultimate outcome of the
war. If, on the contrary, they were to yield to the German demand, they would be
making Belgium an accessory to the attack on France as well as a violator of her
own neutrality, besides opening her to German occupation with small likelihood
that a victorious Germany would remember to withdraw. They would be occupied
either way; to yield would be to lose honor too.
“If we are to be crushed,” Bassompierre recorded their sentiment, “let us
be crushed gloriously.” In 1914 “glory” was a word spoken without
embarrassment, and honor a familiar concept that people believed in.
Van der Elst broke the silence in the room. “Well, sir, are we ready?” he
asked the Premier.
“Yes, we are ready,” De Broqueville answered. “Yes,” he repeated, as if
trying to convince himself, “except for one thing—we have not yet got our heavy
artillery.” Only in the last year had the government obtained increased military
appropriations from a reluctant Parliament conditioned to neutrality. The order for
heavy guns had been given to the German firm of Krupp, which, not surprisingly,
had delayed deliveries.
One hour of the twelve had already gone by. While their colleagues began
rounding up all Ministers for a Council of State to be held at nine o’clock,
Bassompierre and Gaiffier started working on a draft of the reply. They had no
need to ask each other what it would be. Leaving the task to them, Premier de
Broqueville went to the palace to inform the King.
********************
....
Since, according to the Belgian constitution, King Albert would become
Commander in Chief only after the outbreak of war, he and Galet were unable in
the meantime to impose their fears or their ideas of strategy upon the General
Staff. The Staff clung to the example of 1870 when not a toe of either the Prussian
36
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
or French armies had stepped over the Belgian border, although if the French had
crossed into Belgian territory they would have had room enough to retreat. King
Albert and Galet, however, believed that the huge growth of armies since that time
made it clearer each year that if the nations marched again they would spill over
onto the old pathways and meet again in the old arena.
The Kaiser had made this perfectly clear in the interview which so stunned
[King Albert’s predecessor] Leopold II in 1904. After his return, Leopold’s shock
gradually wore off, for, as van der Elst, to whom the King reported the interview,
agreed, William was such a weathercock, how could one be sure? On a return visit
to Brussels in 1910, the Kaiser proved indeed to be most reassuring. Belgium had
nothing to fear from Germany, he told van der Elst. “You will have no grounds of
complaint against Germany.... I understand perfectly your country’s position.... I
shall never place her in a false position.”
On the whole, Belgians believed him. They took their guarantee of
neutrality seriously. Belgium had neglected her army, frontier defenses, fortresses,
anything that implied lack of confidence in the protective treaty.
....
********************
In Berlin, too, a late meeting was being held that night of August 2. At the
Chancellor’s house, Bethmann-Hollweg, General von Moltke, and Admiral
Tirpitz were conferring about a declaration of war on France as they had conferred
the night before about Russia. Tirpitz complained “again and again” that he could
not understand why these declarations of war were necessary. They always had an
“aggressive flavor”; an army could march “without such things.” Bethmann
pointed out that a declaration of war on France was necessary because Germany
wanted to march through Belgium. Tirpitz repeated Ambassador Lichnowsky’s
warnings from London that an invasion of Belgium would bring England in; he
suggested that the entry into Belgium might be delayed. Moltke, terrified by
another threat to his schedule, at once declared this to be “impossible”; nothing
must be allowed to interfere with the “machinery of transport.”
He did not himself, he said, attach much value to declarations of war.
French hostile acts during the days had already made war a fact. He was referring
to the alleged reports of French bombings in the Nuremberg area which the
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
37
German press had been blazing forth in extras all day with such effect that people
in Berlin went about looking nervously at the sky. In fact, no bombings had taken
place. Now, according to German logic, a declaration of war was found to be
necessary because of the imaginary bombings.
Tirpitz still deplored it. There could be no doubt in the world, he said, that
the French were “at least intellectually the aggressors”; but owing to the
carelessness of German politicians in not making this clear to the world, the
invasion of Belgium, which was “a pure emergency measure,” would be made to
appear unfairly “in the fateful light of a brutal act of violence.”
In Brussels, after the Council of State broke up at 4:00 A.M. on the
morning of August 3, Davignon returned to the Foreign Office and instructed his
Political Secretary, Baron de Gaiffier, to deliver Belgium’s reply to the German
Minister. At precisely 7:00 A.M., the last moment of the twelve hours, Gaiffier
rang the doorbell of the German Legation and delivered the reply to Herr von
Below. On his way home he heard the cries of newsboys as the Monday morning
papers announced the text of the ultimatum and the Belgian answer. He heard the
sharp exclamations as people read the news and gathered in excited groups.
Belgium’s defiant “No!” exhilarated the public. Many expressed the belief that it
would cause the Germans to skirt their territory rather than risk universal censure.
“The Germans are dangerous but they are not maniacs,” people assured one
another.
Even in the palace and in the ministries some hope persisted; it was hard
to believe that the Germans would deliberately choose to start the war by putting
themselves in the wrong. The last hope vanished when the Kaiser’s belated reply
to King Albert’s personal appeal of two days before was received on the evening
of August 3. It was one more attempt to induce the Belgians to acquiesce without
fighting. “Only with the most friendly intentions toward Belgium,” the Kaiser
telegraphed, had he made his grave demand. “As the conditions laid down make
clear, the possibility of maintaining our former and present relations still lies in
the hands of Your Majesty.”
“What does he take me for?” King Albert exclaimed in the first show of
anger he had allowed himself since the crisis began. Assuming the supreme
command, he at once gave orders for the blowing up of the Meuse bridges at
Liège and of the railroad tunnels and bridges at the Luxembourg frontier. He still
postponed sending the appeal for military help and alliance to Britain and France.
38
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
Belgian neutrality had been one collective act of the European Powers that almost
succeeded. King Albert could not bring himself to sign its death certificate until
the overt act of invasion had actually taken place.
CHAPTER NINE—“HOME BEFORE THE LEAVES FALL”
On Sunday afternoon, August 2, a few hours before the German ultimatum
was delivered in Brussels, Grey asked the British Cabinet for authority to fulfill
the naval engagement to defend the French Channel coast. No more distressing
moment can ever face a British government than that which requires it to come to
a hard and fast and specific decision. Through the long afternoon the Cabinet
squirmed uncomfortably, unready and unwilling to grasp the handle of final
commitment.
In France war came and was accepted as a kind of national fate, however
deeply a part of the people would have preferred to avoid it. Almost in awe, a
foreign observer reported the upsurge of “national devotion” joined with an
“entire absence of excitement” in a people of whom it had so often been predicted
that anarchical influences had undermined their patriotism and would prove fatal
in the event of war. Belgium, where there occurred one of the rare appearances of
the hero in history, was lifted above herself by the uncomplicated conscience of
her King and, faced with the choice to acquiesce or resist, took less than three
hours to make her decision, knowing it might be mortal.
Britain had no Albert and no Alsace. Her weapons were ready but not her
will. Over the past ten years she had studied and prepared for the war that was
now upon her and had developed, since 1905, a system called the “War Book”
which left nothing to the traditional British practice of muddling through. All
orders to be issued in the event of war were ready for signature; envelopes were
addressed; notices and proclamations were either printed or set up in type, and the
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
39
King never moved from London without having with him those that required his
immediate signature. The method was plain; the muddle was in the British mind.
The appearance of a German fleet in the Channel would have been no less
direct a challenge to Britain than the Spanish Armada of long ago, and the Sunday
Cabinet reluctantly agreed to Grey’s request. The written pledge which that
afternoon he handed to Cambon read, “If the German Fleet comes into the
Channel or through the North Sea to undertake hostile operations against the
French coasts or shipping, the British Fleet will give all protection in its power.”
Grey added, however, that the pledge “does not bind us to go to war with
Germany unless the German fleet took the action indicated.” Voicing the real fear
of the Cabinet, he said that as England was uncertain of the protection of her own
coasts, “it was impossible safely to send our military forces out of the country.”
M. Cambon asked whether this meant Britain would never do so. Grey
replied that his words “dealt only with the present moment.” Cambon suggested
sending two divisions for “moral effect.” Grey said that to send so small a force or
even four divisions “would entail the maximum risk to them and produce the
minimum of effect.” He added that the naval commitment must not become public
until Parliament could be informed on the next day.
Half in despair but yet in hope, Cambon informed his government of the
pledge in a “very secret” telegram which reached Paris at 8:30 that night. Though
it was but a one-legged commitment, far less than France had counted on, he
believed it would lead to full belligerency, for, as he later put it, nations do not
wage war “by halves.”
But the naval pledge was only wrung from the Cabinet at the cost of the
break that Asquith had been trying so hard to prevent. Two ministers, Lord
Morley and John Burns, resigned; the formidable Lloyd George was still
“doubtful.” Morley believed the dissolution of the Cabinet was “in full view that
afternoon.” Asquith had to confess “we are on the brink of a split.”
Churchill, always ready to anticipate events, appointed himself emissary to
bring his former party, the Tories, into a coalition government. As soon as the
Cabinet was over he hurried off to see Balfour, the former Tory Prime Minister,
who like the other leaders of his party believed that Britain must carry through the
policy that had created the Entente to its logical, if bitter, end. Churchill told him
he expected half the Liberal Cabinet to resign if war were declared. Balfour
40
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
replied that his party would be prepared to join a coalition, although if it came to
that necessity he foresaw the country rent by an antiwar movement led by the
seceding Liberals.
Up to this moment the German ultimatum to Belgium was not yet known.
The underlying issue in the thinking of men like Churchill and Balfour, Haldane
and Grey was the threatened German hegemony of Europe if France were crushed.
But the policy that required support of France had developed behind closed doors
and had never been fully admitted to the country. The majority of the Liberal
government did not accept it. On this issue neither government nor country would
have gone to war united. To many, if not to most Englishmen, the crisis was
another phase in the old quarrel between Germany and France, and none of
England’s affair. To make it England’s affair in the eyes of the public, the
violation of Belgium, child of English policy, where every step of the invaders
would trample on a treaty of which England was architect and signatory, was
required. Grey determined to ask the Cabinet next morning to regard such
invasion as a formal casus belli.
That evening as he was at dinner with Haldane, a Foreign Office
messenger brought over a dispatch box with a telegram which, according to
Haldane’s account, warned that “Germany was about to invade Belgium.” What
this telegram was or from whom it came is not clear, but Grey must have
considered it authentic. Passing it to Haldane, Grey asked him what he thought.
“Immediate mobilization,” Haldane replied.
They at once left the dinner table and drove to Downing Street where they
found the Prime Minister with some guests. Taking him into a private room, they
showed him the telegram and asked for authority to mobilize. Asquith agreed.
Haldane suggested that he be temporarily reappointed to the War Office for the
emergency. The Prime Minister would be too busy next day to perform the War
Minister’s duties. Asquith again agreed, the more readily as he was uncomfortably
conscious of the looming autocrat, Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum,
whom he had already been urged to appoint to the empty chair.
Next morning, Bank Holiday Monday, was a clear and beautiful summer
day. London was crammed with holiday crowds drawn to the capital instead of the
seashore by the crisis. By midday they were so thick in Whitehall that cars could
not get through, and the hum of milling people could be heard inside the Cabinet
room where the ministers, meeting again in almost continuous session, were
trying to make up their minds whether to fight on the issue of Belgium.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
41
Over at the War Office Lord Haldane was already sending out the
mobilization telegrams calling up Reservists and Territorials. At eleven o’clock
the Cabinet received news of Belgium’s decision to pit her six divisions against
the German Empire. Half an hour later they received a declaration from the
Conservative leaders, written before the ultimatum to Belgium was known, stating
that it would be “fatal to the honor and security of the United Kingdom” to
hesitate in support of France and Russia. Russia as an ally already stuck in the
throats of most Liberal ministers. Two more of them—Sir John Simon and Lord
Beauchamp—resigned, but the events in Belgium decided the pivotal Lloyd
George to stay with the government.
********************
At three o’clock that afternoon of August 3, Grey was due in Parliament to
make the government’s first official and public statement on the crisis. All
Europe, as well as all England, was hanging on it. Grey’s task was to bring his
country into war and bring her in united. He had to carry with him his own,
traditionally pacifist, party. He had to explain to the oldest and most practiced
parliamentary body in the world how Britain was committed to support France by
virtue of something that was not a commitment. He must present Belgium as the
cause without hiding France as the basic cause; he must appeal to Britain’s honor
while making it clear that Britain’s interest was the deciding factor; he must stand
where a tradition of debate on foreign affairs had flourished for three hundred
years and, without the brilliance of Burke or the force of Pitt, without Canning’s
mastery or Palmerston’s jaunty nerve, without the rhetoric of Gladstone or the wit
of Disraeli, justify the course of British foreign policy under his stewardship and
the war it could not prevent. He must convince the present, measure up to the past,
and speak to posterity.
He had had no time to prepare a written speech. In the last hour, as he was
trying to compose his notes, the German ambassador was announced. Lichnowsky
entered anxiously, asking what had the Cabinet decided? What was Grey going to
tell the House? Would it be a declaration of war? Grey answered that it would not
be a declaration of war but “a statement of conditions.” Was the neutrality of
Belgium one of the conditions? Lichnowsky asked. He “implored” Grey not to
42
TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
name it as one. He knew nothing of the plans of the German General Staff, but he
could not suppose a “serious” violation was included in them, although German
troops might traverse one small corner of Belgium. “If so,” Lichnowsky said,
voicing the eternal epitaph of man’s surrender to events, “that could not be altered
now.”
They talked standing in the doorway, each oppressed by his own urgency,
Grey trying to leave for some last moments of privacy in which to work on his
speech, Lichnowsky trying to hold back the moment of the challenge made
explicit. They parted and never saw each other officially again.
The House had gathered in total attendance for the first time since
Gladstone brought in the Home Rule Bill in 1893. To accommodate all the
members extra chairs were set up in the gangway. The Diplomatic Gallery was
packed except for two empty seats marking the absence of the German and
Austrian ambassadors. Visitors from the Lords filled the Strangers’ Gallery,
among them Field Marshal Lord Roberts, so long and vainly the advocate of
compulsory military service. In the tense hush when, for once, no one bustled,
passed notes, or leaned over benches to chat in whispers, there was a sudden
clatter as the Chaplain, backing away from the Speaker, stumbled over the extra
chairs in the aisle. All eyes were on the government bench where Grey in a light
summer suit sat between Asquith whose bland face expressed nothing and Lloyd
George whose disheveled hair and cheeks drained of all color made him look
years older.
Grey, appearing “pale, haggard and worn,” rose to his feet. Though he had
been a member of the House for twenty-nine years and on the Government bench
for the last eight, members on the whole knew little—and the country much less—
of his conduct of foreign policy. Questions put to the Foreign Secretary rarely
succeeded in trapping Grey into a clear or definitive answer, yet his evasiveness,
which in a more adventurous statesman would have been challenged, was not
regarded with suspicion. So non-cosmopolitan, so English, so county, so reserved,
Grey could not be regarded by anyone as a mettlesome mixer in foreign quarrels.
He did not love foreign affairs or enjoy his job but deplored it as a necessary duty.
He did not run over to the Continent for weekends but disappeared into the
country. He spoke no foreign language beyond a schoolboy French. A widower at
fifty-two, childless, nongregarious, he seemed as unattached to ordinary passions
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
43
as to his office. What passion broke through his walled personality was reserved
for trout streams and bird calls.
Speaking slowly but with evident emotion, Grey asked the House to
approach the crisis from the point of view of “British interests, British honor and
British obligations.” He told the history of the military “conversations” with
France. He said that no “secret engagement” bound the House or restricted
Britain’s freedom to decide her own course of action. He said France was
involved in the war because of her “obligation of honor” to Russia, but “we are
not parties to the Franco-Russian alliance; we do not even know the terms of that
alliance.” He seemed to be leaning so far over backward to show England to be
uncommitted that a worried Tory, Lord Derby, whispered angrily to his neighbor,
“By God, they are going to desert Belgium!”
Grey then revealed the naval arrangement with France. He told the House
how, as a consequence of agreement with Britain, the French fleet was
concentrated in the Mediterranean, leaving the northern and western coasts of
France “absolutely undefended.” He said it would be his “feeling” that “if the
German fleet came down the Channel and bombarded and battered the
undefended coasts of France, we could not stand aside and see this going on
practically within sight of our eyes, with our arms folded, looking on
dispassionately, doing nothing!” Cheers burst from the Opposition benches, while
the Liberals listened, “somberly acquiescent.”
To explain his having already committed Britain to defend France’s
Channel coasts, Grey entered into an involved argument about “British interests”
and British trade routes in the Mediterranean. It was a tangled skein, and he
hurried on to the “more serious consideration, becoming more serious every
hour,” of Belgian neutrality.
To give the subject all its due, Grey, wisely not relying on his own oratory,
borrowed Gladstone’s thunder of 1870, “Could this country stand by and witness
the direst crime that ever stained the pages of history and thus become
participators in the sin?” From Gladstone too, he took a phrase to express the
fundamental issue—that England must take her stand “against the unmeasured
aggrandizement of any power whatsoever.”
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In his own words he continued: “I ask the House from the point of view of
British interests to consider what may be at stake. If France is beaten to her knees
... if Belgium fell under the same dominating influence and then Holland and then
Denmark ... if, in a crisis like this, we run away from these obligations of honor
and interest as regards the Belgian Treaty ... I do not believe for a moment that, at
the end of this war, even if we stood aside, we should be able to undo what had
happened, in the course of the war, to prevent the whole of the West of Europe
opposite us from falling under the domination of a single power ... and we should,
I believe, sacrifice our respect and good name and reputation before the world and
should not escape the most serious and grave economic consequences.”
He placed before them the “issue and the choice.” The House, which had
listened in “painful absorption” for an hour and a quarter, broke into
overwhelming applause, signifying its answer. The occasions when an individual
is able to harness a nation are memorable, and Grey’s speech proved to be one of
those junctures by which people afterward date events. Some dissent was still
vocal, for, unlike the continental parliaments, the House of Commons was not to
be exhorted or persuaded into unanimity. Ramsay MacDonald, speaking for the
Laborites, said Britain should have remained neutral; Keir Hardie said he would
raise the working classes against the war; and afterward in the lobby, a group of
unconvinced Liberals adopted a resolution stating that Grey had failed to make a
case for war. But Asquith was convinced that on the whole “our extreme peace
lovers are silenced though they will soon find their tongues again.” The two
ministers who had resigned that morning were persuaded to return that evening,
and it was generally felt that Grey had carried the country.
“What happens now?” Churchill asked Grey as they left the House
together. “Now,” replied Grey, “we shall send them an ultimatum to stop the
invasion of Belgium within 24 hours.” To Cambon, a few hours later, he said, “If
they refuse, there will be war.” Although he was to wait almost another twentyfour hours before sending the ultimatum, Lichnowsky’s fear had been fulfilled;
Belgium had been made the condition.
The Germans took that chance because they expected a short war and
because, despite the last-minute moans and apprehensions of their civilian leaders
over what the British might do, the German General Staff had already taken
British belligerency into account and discounted it as of little or no significance in
a war they believed would be over in four months.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
45
Clausewitz, a dead Prussian, and Norman Angell, a living if
misunderstood professor, had combined to fasten the short-war concept upon the
European mind. Quick, decisive victory was the German orthodoxy; the economic
impossibility of a long war was everybody’s orthodoxy. “You will be home before
the leaves have fallen from the trees,” the Kaiser told departing troops in the first
week of August. A diarist of German court society recorded on August 9 that
Count Oppersdorf came in that afternoon and said things could not last ten weeks;
Count Hochberg thought eight weeks, and after that, “You and I will be meeting
again in England.”
A German officer leaving for the Western Front said he expected to take
breakfast at the Café de la Paix in Paris on Sedan Day (September 2). Russian
officers expected to be in Berlin about the same time; six weeks was the usual
allowance. One officer of the Imperial Guard asked the opinion of the Czar’s
physician whether he should pack at once his full-dress uniform to wear for the
entry into Berlin or leave it to be brought by the next courier coming to the front.
An English officer who, having served as a military attaché in Brussels, was
considered au courant, was asked, upon joining his regiment, his opinion of the
duration. He did not know, the officer replied, but he understood there were
“financial reasons why the Great Powers could not continue for long.” He had
heard it from the Prime Minister “who told me that Lord Haldane told him so.”
In St. Petersburg the question was not whether the Russians could win but
whether it would take them two months or three; pessimists who suggested six
months were considered defeatists. “Vasilii Fedorovitch (William, son of
Frederick, that is, the Kaiser) has made a mistake; he won’t be able to hold out,”
solemnly predicted the Russian Minister of Justice. He was not so very wrong.
Germany had not planned on the need to hold out for long and upon entering the
war had a stockpile of nitrates for making gunpowder sufficient for six months
and no more. Only the later discovery of a method for fixing nitrogen out of the
air enabled her war effort to continue. The French, gambling on a quick finish,
risked no troops on what would have been a difficult defense of the Lorraine iron
basin but allowed the Germans to take it on the theory that they would regain it
with victory. As a result they lost 80 per cent of their iron ore for the duration and
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almost lost the war. The English, in their imprecise fashion, counted vaguely on
victory, without specifying when, where, or how, within a matter of months.
Whether from instinct or intellect, three minds, all military, saw the dark
shadow lengthening ahead into years, not months. Moltke, foretelling the “long,
wearisome struggle,” was one. Joffre was another. Questioned by ministers in
1912 he had said that if France won the first victory in a war, German national
resistance would then commence, and vice versa. In either case other nations
would be drawn in, and the result would be a war of “indefinite duration.” Yet
neither he nor Moltke, who were their countries’ military chiefs since 1911 and
1906 respectively, made any allowance in their plans for the war of attrition which
they both foresaw.
The third—and the only one to act upon his vision—was Lord Kitchener,
who had no part in the original planning. Hastily recalled to become War Minister
on August 4, as he was about to board a Channel steamer to take him to Egypt, he
brought forth from some fathomless oracular depths of his being the prediction
that the war would last three years. To an incredulous colleague he said it might
last even longer, but “three years will do to begin with. A nation like Germany,
after having forced the issue, will only give in after it is beaten to the ground. That
will take a very long time. No one living knows how long.”
Except for Kitchener who, from his first day in office insisted on preparing
an army of millions for a war lasting years, no one else made plans reaching ahead
for more than three or six months. In the case of the Germans, the fixed idea of a
short war embraced the corollary that in a short war English belligerency would
not matter.
“If only someone had told me beforehand that England would take up arms
against us!” wailed the Kaiser during lunch at Headquarters one day later in the
war. Someone in a small voice ventured, “Metternich,” referring to the German
ambassador in London who had been dismissed in 1912 because of his tiresome
habit of predicting that naval increases would bring war with England no later
than 1915. In 1912 Haldane had told the Kaiser that Britain could never permit
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
47
German possession of the French Channel ports, and reminded him of the treaty
obligation to Belgium. In 1912 Prince Henry of Prussia had asked his cousin King
George point-blank “whether in the event of Germany and Austria going to war
with Russia and France, England would come to the assistance of the two latter
powers?” King George had replied, “Undoubtedly yes, under certain
circumstances.”
In spite of these warnings the Kaiser refused to believe what he knew to be
true. According to the evidence of a companion, he was still “convinced” England
would stay neutral when he went back to his yacht after giving Austria a free hand
on July 5. His two Corpsbrüder from student days at Bonn, Bethmann and Jagow,
whose qualification for office consisted chiefly in the Kaiser’s sentimental
weakness for brothers who wore the black and white ribbon of the fraternity and
called each other du, comforted themselves at intervals, like devout Catholics
fingering their beads, with mutual assurances of British neutrality.
Moltke and the General Staff did not need Grey or anyone else to spell out
for them what England would do, for they already counted on her coming in as an
absolute certainty. “The more English the better,” Moltke said to Admiral Tirpitz,
meaning the more who landed on the Continent the more would be netted in
decisive defeat. Moltke’s natural pessimism spared him the illusions of wishful
thinking. In a memorandum he drew up in 1913 he stated the case more accurately
than many Englishmen could have done. If Germany marched through Belgium
without Belgian consent, he wrote, “then England will and must join our
enemies,” the more so as she had declared that intention in 1870. He did not think
anyone in England would believe German promises to evacuate Belgium after
defeating France, and he felt sure that in a war between Germany and France,
England would fight whether Germany went through Belgium or not, “because
she fears German hegemony and true to her policy of maintaining a balance of
power will do all she can to check the increase of German power.”
“In the years immediately preceding the war, we had no doubt whatever of
the rapid arrival of the British Expeditionary Force on the French coast,” testified
General von Kuhl, a General Staff officer of the top echelon. The Staff calculated
that the BEF would be mobilized by the tenth day, gather at embarkation ports on
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the eleventh, begin embarkation on the twelfth, and complete the transfer to
France on the fourteenth day. This proved to be almost dead reckoning.
Nor was Germany’s naval staff under any illusions. “England probably
hostile in case it comes to war,” the Admiralty telegraphed as early as July 11 to
Admiral von Spee on board the Scharnhorst in the Pacific.
********************
Two hours after Grey finished speaking in the House of Commons, that
event took place which had been in the back of every mind on both sides of the
Rhine since 1870 and in the front of most since 1905. Germany declared war on
France. To Germans it came, said the Crown Prince, as the “military solution” of
the ever-increasing tension, the end of the nightmare of encirclement. “It is a joy
to be alive,” rejoiced a German paper on that day in a special edition headlined
“The Blessing of Arms.” Germans, it said, were “exulting with happiness.... We
have wished so much for this hour.... The sword which has been forced into our
hand will not be sheathed until our aims are won and our territory extended as far
as necessity demands.” Not everyone was exulting. Deputies of the left,
summoned to the Reichstag, found each other “depressed” and “nervous.” One,
confessing readiness to vote all war credits, muttered, “We can’t let them destroy
the Reich.” Another kept grumbling, “This incompetent diplomacy, this
incompetent diplomacy.”
For France the signal came at 6:15 when Premier Viviani’s telephone rang
and he heard the American ambassador, Myron Herrick, tell him in a voice
choked with tears that he had just received a request to take over the German
Embassy and hoist the American flag on its flagpole. He had accepted the charge,
Herrick said, but not the flag raising.
Knowing exactly what this meant, Viviani waited for the imminent arrival
of the German ambassador, who was announced a few moments later. Von
Schoen, who had a Belgian wife, entered in visible distress. He began by
complaining that on the way over a lady had thrust her head through the window
of his carriage and insulted “me and my Emperor.” Viviani, whose own nerves
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
49
were strung taught with the anguish of the last few days, asked if this complaint
was the purpose of his visit. Schoen admitted he had a further duty to perform
and, unfolding the document he carried, read its contents, which, as he was the
“soul of honor” according to Poincaré, were the cause of his embarrassment. In
consequence, it read, of French acts of “organized hostility” and of air attacks on
Nuremberg and Karlsruhe and of violation of Belgian neutrality by French
aviators flying over Belgian territory, “the German Empire considers itself in a
state of war with France.”
Viviani formally denied the charges which were included less to impress
the French government, who would know they had not taken place, than to
impress the German public at home that they were the victims of French
aggression. He escorted von Schoen to the door and then, almost reluctant to
come to the final parting, walked with him out of the building, down the steps, as
far as the door of his waiting carriage. The two representatives of the “hereditary
enemies” stood for a moment in mutual unhappiness, bowed wordlessly to each
other, and von Schoen drove away into the dusk.
In Whitehall that evening, Sir Edward Grey, standing with a friend at the
window as the street lamps below were being lit, made the remark that has since
epitomized the hour: “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see
them lit again in our lifetime.”
********************
....
At a joint session of the Senate and Chamber, Viviani, pale as death and
looking as if he were suffering physically and mentally, surpassed his own
capacity for fire and eloquence in a speech that was acclaimed, like everybody’s
on that day, as the greatest of his career. He carried with him in his portfolio the
text of France’s treaty with Russia but was not questioned about it. Ecstatic cheers
greeted his announcement that Italy, “with the clarity of insight possessed by the
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TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
Latin intellect,” had declared her neutrality. As expected, the third member of the
Triple Alliance, when the test came, had side-stepped on the ground that Austria’s
attack on Serbia was an act of aggression which released her from her treaty
obligations. Relieving France of the need to guard her southern frontier, Italy’s
neutrality was worth an extra four divisions, or 80,000 men.
....
********************
....
At three o’clock members reconvened in the Reichstag to hear an address
by the Chancellor and to perform the remainder of their duty which consisted first
of voting war credits and then adjournment. The Social Democrats agreed to make
the vote unanimous, and spent their last hours of parliamentary responsibility in
anxious consultation whether to join in a “Hoch!” for the Kaiser which they
satisfactorily resolved by making it a Hoch for “Kaiser, People, and Country.”
Everyone, as Bethmann rose to speak, waited in painful expectancy for
what he had to say about Belgium. A year ago Foreign Minister Jagow had
assured a secret session of the Reichstag steering committee that Germany would
never violate Belgium, and General von Heeringen, then War Minister, had
promised that the Supreme Command in the event of war would respect
Belgium’s neutrality as long as Germany’s enemies did. On August 4 deputies did
not know that their armies had invaded Belgium that morning. They knew of the
ultimatum but nothing of the Belgian reply because the German government,
wishing to give the impression that Belgium had acquiesced and that her armed
resistance was therefore illegal, never published it.
“Our troops,” Bethmann informed the tense audience, “have occupied
Luxembourg and perhaps”—the “perhaps” was posthumous by eight hours—“are
already in Belgium.” (Great commotion.) True, France had given Belgium a
pledge to respect her neutrality, but “We knew that France was standing ready to
invade Belgium” and “we could not wait.” It was, he said inevitably, a case of
military necessity, and “necessity knows no law.”
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
51
So far he had his hearers, both the right which despised him and the left
which mistrusted him, in thrall. His next sentence created a sensation. “Our
invasion of Belgium is contrary to international law but the wrong—I speak
openly—that we are committing we will make good as soon as our military goal
has been reached.” Admiral Tirpitz considered this the greatest blunder ever
spoken by a German statesman; Conrad Haussman, a leader of the Liberal party,
considered it the finest part of the speech. The act having been confessed in a
public mea culpa, he and his fellow deputies of the left felt purged of guilt and
saluted the Chancellor with a loud “Sehr richtig!” In a final striking phrase—and
before his day of memorable maxims was over he was to add one more that would
make him immortal—Bethmann said that whoever was as badly threatened as
were the Germans could think only of how to “hack his way through.”
A war credit of five billion marks was voted unanimously, after which the
Reichstag voted itself out of session for four months or for what was generally
expected to be the duration. Bethmann closed the proceedings with an assurance
that carried overtones of the gladiators’ salute: “Whatever our lot may be, August
4, 1914, will remain for all eternity one of Germany’s greatest days!”
That evening at seven o’clock England’s answer, awaited so long in such
anxiety by so many, was finally made definitive. That morning the British
government had finally screwed its determination to the sticking point sufficiently
to deliver an ultimatum. It arrived, however, in two parts. First, Grey asked for an
assurance that German demands upon Belgium would not be “proceded with” and
for an “immediate reply,” but as he attached no time limit and mentioned no
sanctions in case of non-reply, the message was not technically an ultimatum. He
waited until after he knew the German Army had invaded Belgium before sending
the second notice stating that Britain felt bound “to uphold the neutrality of
Belgium and the observance of the treaty to which Germany is as much a party, as
ourselves.” A “satisfactory reply” was demanded by midnight, failing which the
British ambassador was to ask for his passports.
Why the ultimatum was not sent the night before, immediately after
Parliament made plain its acceptance of Grey’s speech, can only be explained by
the government’s irresolute state of mind. What sort of “satisfactory reply” it
expected, short of the Germans meekly retreating across the frontier they had
deliberately and irrevocably crossed that morning, and why England agreed to
wait for so fanciful a phenomenon until midnight, can hardly be explained at all.
In the Mediterranean that night the lost hours before midnight were to be crucial.
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In Berlin, the British ambassador, Sir Edward Goschen, presented the
ultimatum in a historic interview with the Chancellor. He found Bethmann “very
agitated.” According to Bethmann himself, “my blood boiled at this hypocritical
harping on Belgium which was not the thing that had driven England into war.”
Indignation launched Bethmann into a harangue. He said that England was doing
an “unthinkable” thing in making war on a “kindred nation,” that “it was like
striking a man from behind while he was fighting for his life against two
assailants,” that as a result of “this last terrible step” England would be
responsible for all the dreadful events that might follow, and “all for just a word—
‘neutrality’—just for a scrap of paper....”
Hardly noticing the phrase that was to resound round the world, Goschen
included it in his report of the interview. He had replied that, if for strategical
reasons it was a matter of life or death for Germany to advance through Belgium,
it was, so to speak, a matter of life or death for Britain to keep her solemn
compact. “His Excellency was so excited, so evidently overcome by the news of
our action, and so little disposed to hear reason,” that he refrained from further
argument.
....
All that was left was to wait for midnight (eleven o’clock, British time)
[for the expiration of the British ultimatum to Germany]. At nine o’clock the
government learned, through an intercepted but uncoded telegram sent out from
Berlin, that Germany had considered itself at war with Britain from the moment
when the British ambassador had asked for his passports. Hastily summoned, the
Cabinet debated whether to declare war as of that moment or wait for the time
limit set by the ultimatum to expire. They decided to wait. In silence, each
encased in his private thoughts, they sat around the green table in the ill-lit
Cabinet room, conscious of the shadows of those who at other fateful moments
had sat there before them. Eyes watched the clock ticking away the time limit.
“Boom!” Big Ben struck the first note of eleven, and each note thereafter sounded
to Lloyd George, who had a Celtic ear for melodrama, like “Doom, doom, doom!”
Twenty minutes later the War Telegram, “War, Germany, act,” was
dispatched. Where and when the army was to act was still unsettled, the decision
having been left for a War Council called for the following day. The British
government went to bed a belligerent, if something less than bellicose.
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
53
********************
Next day, with the assault on Liège, the first battle of the war began.
Europe was entering, Moltke wrote that day to Conrad von Hötzendorff, upon
“the struggle that will decide the course of history for the next hundred years.”
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{This page is material provided by Professor Setear,
not an excerpt from The Guns of August.}
A DISCUSSION QUESTION
In the description above, what role does international law play in
international politics? (I suggest that you make a list of all the places in the text at
which international law is mentioned; for each place where international law is
mentioned, you should briefly describe, inter alia, whether those involved treated
international legal obligations seriously.)
BARBARA TUCHMAN, THE GUNS OF AUGUST
55